“[Nineteen thirty-four]. In my memory [Hitler’s] voice rises without end. It’s strange that our brains will allow this—to hear a scale as eternally ascending, an impossible staircase. This is a wondrous but terrible fact of our wiring, how clockwise movement across the pitch class creates this impression. Pitch circularity, it is called. Or a Shepard tone. In psychoacoustics, which is a beautiful field, a quantum field. You must read my friend Diana Deutsch, as I’ve told you before. C-sharp is heard as higher than C; D as higher than C-sharp; D-sharp as higher than D; and so on endlessly. I think if I were interviewing me, what the businessmen call the ‘exit interview’—” —I would begin by asking about the airwaves of my youth, the ether. That I was a child when there were these angels and devils that spoke at a distance. It was not so new, of course, the radio, but it was all I knew, it was never And none of this was so for my parents, when they were born. I am making this distinction.” “It was always on at home?” “It is maybe silly to be so literal now? It is late for the literal, no? We practice literature, not law. It was on even when off. Because it structured experience even when quiet.

Ben Lerner, Transcription